Wednesday, February 1, 2017

EMMETT TILL – THE UNINTENTIONAL CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT MARTYR

PROLOGUE

Today marks the start of Black History Month 2017. I
had originally wanted to write a post about African-Americans, who have been affiliated
with NASA, given the success of the movie, Hidden Figures. But then, last week, I read news
that was so astounding and actually altered history, that I felt compelled to
tell a different story, and honor the memory of Emmett Louis Till.

Emmett
Louis Tillwas an African-Americanteenager, who was lynched in Mississippi, at
the ridiculously young age of 14, after reportedly flirting with, and allegedly
intimidating, a white woman, named Carolyn Bryant. The murder suspects –
Carolyn’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were acquitted
of kidnapping and murdering Emmett, only one month later. A few months after their acquittal, the two
men admitted in a published magazine article, that they had, indeed, cut short
Emmett’s young life, in the most horrific of ways. In January 2017, the world found out that, 10
years earlier, Carolyn Bryant finally admitted to lying about the incident. Yes.
Lying.

This is
Emmett’s story, which now, has more closure, even though that closure is bloody,
brutal and burning.

BEFORE MISSISSIPPI

Emmett Till
was born on July 25, 1941, in Chicago, Illinois, the son ofMamie (Carthan) Till andLouis
Till. Mamie was born in the small, Delta Countytown ofWebb, Mississippi.Mississippi was the poorest state in the U.S.
in the 1950s, and the Delta counties were some of the poorest in Mississippi.
Economic opportunities for blacks were almost nonexistent. Most of them were sharecroppers, who lived on land owned by white
men. Black people also had very few legal rights at that time.

Emmett Till & his mother, Mamie

Emmett never knew his father, Louis, a Private
in the United States Army during World War II. Emmett’s mother, Mamie was
considered to be an extraordinary woman. Defying the social constraints and
discrimination she faced as an African-American woman, growing up in the 1920s
and '30s, Mamie excelled, both academically and professionally. She was only
the fourth, black student to graduate from Chicago's predominantly white Argo
Community High School, and the first black student to make the school's
"A" Honor Roll. Mamie largely raised
Emmett with her mother because she
and Louis separated in 1942. While raising Emmett as a single mother, Mamie
worked long hours for the United States Air Force as a civilian clerk in charge of
confidential files.

14-year-old Emmett

At the age of six, Emmett contractedPolio, leaving him with a persistentstutter, but because he was physically robust, he was able to help his mother with the cleaning, cooking and laundry. He was also considered to be a very happy child, and had a mischievous sense of humor – often telling jokes and playing harmless pranks on his friends and family.

Emmett was quite the natty dresser, and was often the center of attention amongst his friends and cousins. His nickname was ‘Bobo’ because of his ‘fun-loving, cheerful disposition.’ Although Emmett had a cherubic face, because of his style of dress and his somewhat stocky build, some people may have mistaken him for being a young adult, rather than a teenager. Mamie and Emmett moved to Detroit, where she remarried in 1951. However, Emmett preferred to live in Chicago, so he returned to the thriving, working-middle class black neighborhood of the South Side, to live with his grandmother. His mother and stepfather rejoined him later.

In the summer of 1955, Mamie’s uncle, 64-year-old Moses "Mose" Wright, who was a sharecropper and part-time minister, visited them in Chicago and
told Emmett stories about living in the Mississippi Delta. Emmett wanted to see
for himself. Mamie was ready for a road trip vacation to Omaha,
Nebraska, and had planned to take Emmett with her. But
Emmett desperately wanted to spend time with his cousins in Mississippi, and in
a “fateful decision that would have grave impact on their lives and the course
of American history, Mamie relented and let him go.”The day before Emmett left for Mississippi, in
mid-August -- Mamie gave her son his late father's signet ring, engraved with the
initials "L.T."The next day,
she drove Emmett to the train station. They kissed goodbye, and Emmett
boarded a train headed for Mississippi. The next time Mamie saw Emmett, he was
dead and unrecognizable.

The ring that Emmett's mother gave him

So Emmett and his cousin, Curtis Jones, returned to
Money, Mississippi – a tiny town, with a population of 200, that had three
stores, a whites-only school, a post office, and a cotton gin. Before Emmett left
for the Delta, his mother warned him that Mississippi was a completely
different place than “Up North” in Chicago, and that, while down there, he
would have to effectively genuflect, whenever he encountered white people. Emmett assured his mother that he understood.

Since 1882,
when statistics onlynchings began to be collected, by
1955, more than 500 African-Americans had been killed by this vigilante
violence, in Mississippi, alone, and more than 3,000 across the South. Most of
these occurred between 1876 and 1930; however they did still occur in later
years. Throughout the South, whites publicly prohibited interracial
relationships, as a means to maintainwhite
supremacy – although, ironically, most of the men who made those laws had no
problem raping black women at their will. Even the suggestion of intimate contact
between black men and white women could carry severe punishments for black men.
White people were to determined to uphold segregation, as a way of keeping black
people politically disenfranchised, and forcefully constrain them from any sense
of social equality.

MISSISSIPPI ENCOUNTER

At the age
of 14, Emmett stepped off the train inMoney,Mississippi, on August 21st. Only three days
later, he and his cousin, Curtis Jones, skipped church where his great-uncle
Mose was preaching, joining some local boys, as they went to Bryant's Grocery
and Meat Market to buy candy and gum. The teenagers were children of
sharecroppers and had been picking cotton all day. The market – which mostly
served the local sharecropper population – was owned by a white couple,
24-year-old Roy Bryant, and his 21-year-oldwife, Carolyn. Carolyn
was alone in the store, that Sunday. Instead of going in the store with Emmett
and the other boys, Curtis left his cousin to go play Checkers across the street.

Bryant's Grocery

According
to Curtis, the other boys reported that Emmett had a photograph of an
integrated class at the school he attended in Chicago,and he bragged to the boys that the white
children in the picture were his friends. Accounts differ, but he either pointed
to a white girl in the picture, or referred to a picture of a white girl that
had come with his new wallet, and said she was his girlfriend. One or more of
the local boys dared Emmett to speak to Carolyn Bryant.

Although
disputed, according to several versions of what happened next, including
comments from some of the kids standing outside the store when Emmett walked in,
Emmett may have ‘wolf-whistled’ at Carolyn. However, one newspaper
account, following his disappearance, stated that Emmett sometimes whistled to calm
his stuttering. His mother said that his speech was sometimes unclear, and that
he had particular difficulty with pronouncing "b" sounds, thus
suggesting that he may have whistled to overcome problems asking for bubble gum.

A young Carolyn Bryant

Carolyn testified,
during the murder trial that Emmett grabbed her hand while she was stocking
candy and said, "How about a date, baby?" She said that after she
freed herself from his grasp, the young man followed her to the cash register, grabbed
her waist and said, "What's the matter baby, can't you take it?"
Carolyn claimed that she then freed herself, and Emmett said, "You needn't
be afraid of me, baby,"used
"one 'unprintable' word” and said, "I've been with white women before.”
Carolyn also alleged that one of Emmett’s companions came into the store,
grabbed him by the arm, and ordered him to leave.

Another of
Emmett’s cousins, Simeon Wright (Mose's son) , writing about the incident decades later, discounted
Carolyn’s testimony, saying that he entered the store "less than a
minute" after Emmett was left inside alone with Carolyn, Simeon “saw no inappropriate
behavior and heard no lecherous conversation.” Simeon said that Emmett
"paid for his items, and we left the store together (note: “The FBI detailed
in their 2006 investigation of the cold case, that a second, anonymous source,
who was confirmed to have been in the store at the same time as Emmett and Simeon,
and supported the latter’s story).”

A young Simeon with his father, "Mose"

At any rate, Carolyn
claimed that she was terrified, and ran to retrieve a gun from her car, which is
when the teenagers ran away.

One of the
other boys ran across the street to tell Curtis what had happened in the store.
When the older man with whom Curtis was playing Checkers heard the story, he
urged the boys to leave quickly, fearing violence. Carolyn told others of the
alleged events at the store, and the story spread quickly. Curtis and Emmett
did not tell great-uncle Mose Wright, fearing they would get in trouble, for so
many reasons.Emmett said he
wanted to return home to Chicago as soon as possible. Meanwhile, Carolyn's
husband, Roy Bryant, was on an extended trip, hauling shrimp to Texas, and did
not return home until 2 days later.

MISSISSIPPI MURDER

AND A FUNERAL THAT SHOOK THE WORLD

When Roy Bryant
was told what had happened, he aggressively questioned several, young black men
who entered his store. Somehow, Roy learned that the young man in the incident
was from Chicago and was staying with Mose Wright. Several witnesses overheard Roy
and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, discussing taking Emmett from his great-uncle’s
house.

In the early
morning hours—between 2:00 and 3:30 am—on August 28, 1955, Roy and J.W., and
another man, drove to Mose Wright's house, armed with a gun and a flashlight.
Roy asked Mose if Emmett was in the house, to which Mose confirmed,"Yes." The 3 vigilantes threatened
to shoot Emmett and told him to get dressed. The men also threatened to kill Mose,
if he reported what he had seen. Mose’s wife offered the men money, but they were
more interested in what they saw as ‘justice,’ rather than money.

They put Emmett
in the back of a pickup truck and drove to several, different locations in
neighboring towns, brutally pistol-whipped and beat him, gouged out his eye and
eventually shot him in the head. The group drove with Emmett in the truck to Roy’s
store, where several people noticed blood pooling in the truck bed. Roy
explained he killed a deer, but in one instance, showed the body to a black man, who questioned him, saying, "that's what happens to smart niggers!"

After leaving
the store with a now dead Emmett, the 3 murderers drove to the town’s cotton
gin to take a 70-pound (32 kg) fan— and drove for several miles along the Tallahatchie River, looking for a place to dispose of Emmett’s body, weighing it down with
the fan, by tying it around his neck with barbed wire.

The cotton gin fan used to weigh down Emmett

After Emmett
was abducted, his great-uncle Mose drove around trying to find him.
Unsuccessful, he returned home by 8:00am. The family eventually contacted the
Sheriff, even though they feared for their lives.

Roy and J.W.
were questioned by the Leflore County Sheriff. They admitted they had taken Emmett,
but claimed they had released him the same night in front of Roy’s store. Roy and
J.W. were arrested for kidnapping. Word got out that Emmett was missing, and soon,several Civil Rights activists
and organizations got involved to try to find out what had happened to Emmett.

Three days
after his abduction, Emmett’s swollen and beyond-recognition, disfigured body
was found by two boys fishing in the Tallahatchie River. Evidence of the
beatings and the shooting were obvious, and his body was still weighted by the
fan that was fastened around his neck with barbed wire. He was naked, but was
still wearing a silver ring with the initials "L. T." – the very ring
that Emmett’s mother had given him before he left for Mississippi. Mose Wright was
called to the river and identified Emmett, who then informed Mamie.

An autopsy was not performed, and Emmett’s body was
clothed, packed in lime, put in a pine coffin, and prepared for immediate burial
in Mississippi. His mother, Mamie, called several local and State authorities in
Illinois and Mississippi, and successfully demanded that the body be returned to
Chicago.

Mamie, enduring the horror of identifying Emmett's mutilated body

The A. A. Rayner Funeral Home, in Chicago, received Emmett’s
body. Upon arrival, Mamie insisted on viewing it to make a positive
identification. As difficult as it was for her, she decided to have an
open-casket funeral, saying, "There was just no way I could describe what
was in that box. No way. I just wanted the world to see, and
I needed somebody to help me tell what it was like."

More than 100,000 people lined the street outside the Funeral Home to view Emmett’s body,
and days later thousands more attended his funeral .

Emmett was buried on
September 6, in Burr Oak Cemeteryin Alsip, Illinois. Here is an 8-minute video that powerfully
speaks the truth of what happened immediately after his death (WARNING VERY
GRAPHIC PHOTOS OF EMMETT POST-MORTEM)

As appeared in JET magazine

Photographs of Emmett’s mutilated corpse circulated around the country, notably appearing inJET magazine andThe Chicago Defender, both black publications, and drew intense public reaction. According toThe NationandNewsweek, Chicago's black community was "aroused as it has not been over any similar act in recent history," white witnesses began changing their story to put Emmett (and even the NAACP) in an unfavorable light.

Emmett’s murder
also aroused feelings way beyond Chicago about segregation, law enforcement,
civil rights, vigilante justice, relations between the North and South, and the
socialcaste system
in The South, which were played out in most of the
media, and continued to gather momentum.

Roy Bryant and J.W.
Milam were indicted for murder. The Grand Jury's prosecuting attorney, was not
confident that he could get a conviction in a case of white violence against a
black man accused of insulting a white woman. A local black paper was surprised
at the indictment and praised the decision, as did theNew York Times. Meanwhile, Mamie had been tirelessly appealing to every politician she could reach, including the President of the United States, to investigate Emmett's murder.

THE TRIAL AND THE MEDIA

During the
trial in Sumner, Mississippi, the small town was besieged by black and white reporters
from all over the country, calling it "the first, great media event of the
Civil Rights Movement.” The
day before the start of the trial, a young, black man named Frank Young arrived
to tell the prosecutor he knew of two witnesses to the crime. Levi Collins and
Henry Lee Loggins were black employees of Leslie Milam, J. W.'s brother, in
whose shed Emmett was first beaten. Levi and Henry were spotted with J. W., Roy, and Emmett. The prosecution team was unaware of Levi and
Henry. The local Sheriff, however, booked them into theCharleston,
Mississippijail, to keep them from testifying.

The trial was
held in September 1955, lasting for five days. The courtroom was filled to its
280-spectator capacity, and as was the custom, was racially segregated, including with the media. Some visitors
from the North found the court to be run with surprising informality. Jury members
were allowed to drink beer, while on duty, and many white men in the audience
wore handguns holstered to their belts.

Scenes from the Trial

The Defense's
primary strategy was arguing that the body pulled from the river could not be
positively identified, and they questioned whether Emmett was dead at all. The
Defense asserted that Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam had taken Emmett, but had let
him go. Emmett’s great-uncle Mose Wright's testimony was considered remarkably
courageous and a first in the State, for a black man implicating the guilt of a
white man in court.

Northern journalists
were especially impressed that Mose stood to identify J.W., pointing to him, saying, [“There
he is.”], calling it an historic moment, and one filled with "electricity,"
and one journalist even calling it "the
most dramatic thing I had ever seen in my career."

The moment that Mose Wright stood up and accused J.W. Milam

Emmett’s
mother, Mamie, testified resolutely, but the Defense questioned her
identification of her son in the casket in Chicago and a $400 life insurance
policy she had taken out on him.

On September 23rd,
the all-white jury acquitted both defendants after a 67-minute deliberation. One
juror said afterwards, "If we hadn't stopped to drink [soda], it wouldn't
have taken that long.”

In later
interviews, some jurors acknowledged that they knew Roy and J.W. were guilty,
but simply did not believe life imprisonment or the death penalty fit
punishment for white men who had killed a black man. Others remained steadfast that they believed the
Defense’s case.

In November
1955, a grand jury declined to indict Roy and J.W. for kidnapping, despite the
testimony given that they had admitted taking Emmett.

So, there was NO justice for Emmett;

NOR his mother and family.

At this point,
the trial had reached international notoriety, and reactions from newspapers in
major, international cities, and religious and socialist publications, were furious
about the verdict and very critical of American society. Meanwhile, Southern
newspapers, particularly in Mississippi, wrote that “the court system had done
its job.”

Protected by
their acquittals, Roy and J.W. sold their story toLookmagazine in 1956 for close to $4,000. J.W.
admitted to shooting Emmett, and neither of them thought of themselves as
guilty, nor that they had done anything wrong.

“Well, what else could we do? He
was hopeless. I'm no bully; I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers—in
their place—I know how to work 'em. But I just decided it was time a few people
got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are
gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain't gonna vote where I live. If they did,
they'd control the government. They ain't gonna go to school with my kids. And
when a nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired o'
livin'. I'm likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we
got some rights. I stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw
that poison at me, and I just made up my mind. 'Chicago boy,' I said, 'I'm
tired of 'em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I'm
going to make an example of you—just so everybody can know how me and my folks
stand.' “

J. W. Milam,Lookmagazine,
1956

Reaction to the
Look interview was explosive. Their brazen admission that they had murdered
Emmett caused prominent Civil Rights leaders to push the Federal Government
harder to investigate the case. Emmett Till’s murder was one of several reasons
theCivil Rights Act of 1957was passed; it allowed theU.S. Department
of Justiceto intervene in local law enforcement issues, when civil
rights were being compromised.

INFLUENCE ON THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Through the
constant attention it received, Emmett’s case became a symbol of elusive
justice for black people in the South. In 1955,The Chicago
Defender newspaper urged its readers to react to
the acquittal by voting in large numbers, a reminder that most blacks in the
South had been disenfranchised since
the turn of the 20th Century.NAACP operative, Amzie Moore, considers Emmett Till’s story to be the start of
the Civil Rights Movement, at the very least, in Mississippi.

The faith in
the white power structure waned rapidly. Negro faith in legalism declined, and
the revolt officially began on December 1, 1955, with the Montgomery, Alabama,
bus boycott. When Rosa Parksrefused
to give up her seat to a white bus rider, sparking a year-long, well-organized, grassrootsboycott
of the bus system, designed to force the city to
change its segregation policies, Rosa later said when she did not get up and
move to the rear of the bus, "I thought of Emmett Till, and I just
couldn't go back."

EMMETT’S STORY IN POPULAR CULTURE

The story of
Emmett Till began to seep into the consciousness of Americans, through media and
literature. For example, The
Harlem Renaissance poet, Langston Hughes, dedicated
an untitled poem (eventually to be known as "Mississippi—1955") to Emmett,
in his October 1, 1955 column inThe
Chicago Defender;

In 1960,Harper Lee publishedTo Kill a Mockingbird, in which a white attorney is committed to defending a
black man, named Tom Robinson, accused of raping a white woman. Harper, whose
novel had a profound effect on civil rights, never publicly stated Tom Robinson's
origins. However, several professors note compelling similarities between Emmett’s
case and that of Tom;

Trial Scene from To Kill a Mockingbird movie

Bob Dylan also recorded
a song titled The Death of Emmett Till, in 1962;

and Emmy Lou Harrisincludes a song, called "My Name
is Emmett Till" on her 2011 album,Hard
Bargain. Here, she sings it live.

LATER EVENTS

After Roy and J.W.
brazenly admitted that they had killed Emmett, their support base in
Mississippi disappeared. Many of their former friends and supporters, including
those who had contributed to their defense funds, cut them off. Their shops
went bankrupt and closed, after blacks boycotted them, and banks refused them
loans to plant crops. Their later lives were full of crime and despair, and
they both died of cancer in Mississippi.

Emmett’s mother,
Mamie, became a teacher, and continued her life as an activist, working to
educate people about her son's murder, until her death in 2003.

In 1996,
documentary filmmaker, Keith Beauchamp,
who was greatly moved by Emmett’s open-casket photograph, started background
research for a feature film he planned to make about the murder. It took the next nine years to research and
produceThe Untold Story of
Emmett Louis Till, released in 2003. That same year,PBS aired an installment of American Experience,titledThe Murder of Emmett Till. In
2005,CBS journalist, Ed
Bradley,aired a60
Minutes report, investigating Emmett’s murder, part
of which showed him tracking down Carolyn Bryant at her home inMississippi. At that time, she still maintained that Emmett was guilty.

Carolyn Bryant on 60 Minutes in 2003

In 2004, the
U.S. Department of Justiceannounced
that it was reopening the case to determine whether anyone other than Roy
Bryant and J.W. Milam had been involved in Emmett’s murder.

In 2005, Emmett’s
body was exhumed and an autopsy was
conducted. Using DNA from Emmett’s relatives, and other technology, the exhumed
body was positively identified as Emmett’s.

Emmett's original casket, post-exhumation

Emmett was
reburied in a new casket, which is the standard practice in cases of body
exhumation. His original casket was donated to recently opened, The
Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The story of Emmett Till is one of
the most important of the last half of the 20th century. And an important
element was the casket.... It is an object that allows us to tell the story, to
feel the pain and understand loss. I want people to feel like I did. I want
people to feel the complexity of emotions.

Lonnie Bunch III, Director of The Smithsonian's
National Museum of African American History and Culture

Mamie Till also recognized that what happened to her son helped open
Americans' eyes to the racial hatred plaguing the country, at the time, and in
doing so, helped spark a massive, protest movement for racial equality and
justice.

THE 60-YEAR OLD LIE

In January 2017, Timothy Tyson, author of
the upcoming bookThe Blood of Emmett Till , and a senior research scholar at
Duke University, released details of a 2007
interview with Carolyn Bryant. He revealed that, in that interview 10
years earlier, Carolyn Bryant Donham (she had divorced and remarried twice)
admitted to him that she had lied about Emmett making advances toward her.
“That part’s not true,” she told Timothy, as reported byVanity Fair. In the interview, the then 72-year-old also said she
could not remember the rest of the events that occurred between she and Emmett
in the grocery store, but “nothing that boy did, could ever justify what
happened to him." When Carolyn, herself [later], lost one of her sons, “she thought about the grief that Mamie must have felt
and grieved all the more, admitting that she ‘felt tender sorrow’
for his mother,” Timothy reportedly wrote in his book.

Understandably, the family is extremely upset about Carolyn's confession, as well as the fact that Timothy Tyson
waited 10 years to go public with it. However, it is the news for which they had been fighting and
waiting, for decades.

Honestly, Carolyn’s confession disgusts me, but
the fact that she lied does not surprise me.

This Chicago Tribute article, reacting
to the news, perfectly reflects how I feel about Carolyn Bryant, the false
accuser.

To quote the article’s author:

“We
will not elevate the status of her lie by calling it a catalyst for the Civil
Rights Movement. We will not ask her to step forward tomorrow and warn America
about the consequences of hatred. After this, we will not bother to think of
her again. Instead, we will use the courage
and wisdom of Mamie Till-Mobley to drive us forward.”

EPILOGUE

While I feel
a tremendous sense of loss for young Emmett’s life, I will continue to “drive
forward’ and tell the stories that must be told, even when they are ugly and
unfair.

2 comments:

i am exhausted reading your article, I can't imagine how you must feel having to research and write about this horrific incident in American history ... you truly did an outstanding job on a difficult subject. Thank you for helping to spread the truth about Emmett Till!

Once again thank you Zena!!! When I visited the African American Museum of History and Culture last November, the entire museum was powerful and moving. However it wasn't until I entered the small alcove where Emmett Till's original casket sat that the tears flowed